Using a persona for outreach purposes merely improves your chances of conversion, don't see a persona as being dishonest it's just a part of you that likes a particular topic.

To create one on twitter, simply create an account using your name or an alias, add a smiley picture and fill the bio with your topical interests. DONE.

Automating the process

So once we have built our new account, we want to begin filling it with tweets of goodness, to do this in the most effective manner we want to automate the process somewhat.

To do this we are going to pull all the RSS feeds from all the top sites around our particular niche. To do this we are going to use a chrome plugin that detects RSS feeds, using this you can simply pull each feed from each site in a speedy manner.

A quicker way to get these RSS feeds it to search Google for "[niche] RSS feeds" or you could try rsssearchhub.com or Google feed search

Once you have your feed (you want at least 10 blogs that publish posts on a regular basis) you need to set up an account over at ifttt.com

First of all, once your account it set up, create a new task and select "RSS feed" for your "this" item

Now select "new feed item" and enter your first feed before moving on to your "that" trigger.

Select "twitter"...."post a new tweet"...."create action" REPEAT THE PROCESS UNTIL ALL FEEDS HAVE BEEN ADDED.

You can easily turn each feed on and off as you wish.

Setting this up will keep your twitter feed active with all the latest news from all the top blogs and sites surrounding your niche.

People in your niche with a link in their bio

People that don't

The quickest way to do this is to find the top 10 influencers in your niche and pull all their followers into excel, to do this you can use a variety of tools from Google docs scripts, Excel add-in and a range of online tools, I personally like Simply Measured as it's free (pay with a tweet), requires no set up and exports up to 10,000 followers at a time.

So the first thing we want to do is filter out all accounts that don't have a URL associated with them, you want to the arrange these by the amount of followers they have and then select the top 100 (depending on how much work you want to put into it).

I'm only saying to arrange by followers as a quick way to "assume" site authority really you should pull all links and analyse from there - I am just talking about for speed here (I'll go stand in the corner on my own now)

Next, write 10 pitching tweets (this works well for give-aways and such but for blog posting opportunities you might want to start a conversation first by asking a question or whatever it just depends on your industry and approach) you can write more if you want but I think 10 tweets per 100 tweeps is fine. If you have a hard niche or want a particular link then be more specific and tailor the tweet directly to them!

Now do some basic excel trickery to pull the twitter handles (@target) and the tweets together so you should be left with 10 different groups of 10 tweets.

Next we want to do the same with people without websites, again arrange them so you get the ones with the most followers, make these tweets a mixture of random compliments (use # tags such as #justspreadingthelove) and questions. Now mix all the tweets up so they are completely random.

You may be thinking why not target 200 with websites! The reason is to not use up all the targets with websites as in the early stages we might take some learning's and want to adjust our pitching tweets etc and to help keep the feed looking natural.

Now we simply load all these into timely.is, this is a one by one process but it will only take about 10 minutes of copy and pasting. Timely will automatically tweet a set number of these randomly throughout the day, the maximum per day is 9 so removing weekends you basically have a months worth of tweets working for you.

Having a mixture off all these tweets will keep your feed looking natural, to further add authenticity add a bunch of one off tweets to your timely feed such as "listening to the kings of Leon today" poor example but you get the gist.

Insert Social Proof

Ever felt the overwhelming urge to look over at something that a group of people are looking at? It's only natural to join a gathering crowd so once your account is maturing (after a couple of weeks) we will be really naughty and buy some followers, you can do this from fiverr.com.

It is ridiculous but how many times have you judged someone on twitter by the number of people they follow and the number of people following them, in our industry this may sound like bollocks but to others, a mass of followers will be like Matt Cutts to a cat sanctuary. - These follower will obviously give you nothing else.

Earlier I mentioned tweeting out to people for engagement, this will gather followers but if you want to gather more followers that are real and targeted you can simply follow people, the majority of people you follow will follow you back if you look interesting enough, there are browsers plugin and software like tweetattacks that you can use to mass follow and unfollow people - Be careful with this as I have tested this method and it got banned (I did however do it very aggressively so I could find the breaking point.)

Conclusion

This is a quick and dirty method but works fine, really though for the long haul you should contribute and really get inside your niche to gain the most benefits from it.